January 5, 2016
ritual disinhibition, shaming and play
"This is a man's car."
Salesgirl drifts a pickup truck Professional motorsports athlete Leona Chin (dubbed Malaysia's Drift Queen), together with Mitsubishi Motors and Maxman.tv, pretends to be a sales girl on her first day selling the Mitsubishi Triton to unsuspecting male customers. Hijinks ensue during the testdrive. This isn't her first time: she's pranked driving instructors before.
"Resist absentminded busyness"
The great Maria Popova, whom I shamefully admit I had never heard of before, posts 16 Elevating Resolutions for 2016 Inspired by Some of Humanity’s Greatest Minds on her Brain Pickings blog. She's a phenomenon and a machine: her wikipedia entry describes her working style (in part) as:
Running Brain Pickings takes over 450 hours of work each month. Popova reads hundreds of pieces of content a day and anywhere between 12-15 books per week. From this, she posts the best to her blog and Twitter feed. She spends anywhere from three to eight hours writing a day, publishes three articles a day from Monday to Friday, and tweets four times per hour between 8am and 11pm Eastern with few exceptions.She was featured also on yesterday's On Point on NPR. I particularly like her charming and well-considered "umm" before most of her answers.
What I Learned from Losing $200 Million
It was 2008, after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Markets were in turmoil. Banks were failing left and right. I worked at a major investment bank, and while I didn’t think the disastrous deal I’d done would cause its collapse, my losses were quickly decimating its commodities profits for the year... [more inside]
PANICKED NUN
There's a lot of heartache.
Meet our darling little Navratilova!
It isn't easy to name a baby these days. This expectant couple followed a simple 64 step plan. Introducing...The Baby Naming Tournament.
Motel Life, Lower Reaches
Back when Roger Miller was King of the Road, in the 1960s, he sang of rooms to let (“no phone, no pool, no pets”) for four bits, or fifty cents. I can’t beat that price, but I did once in those days come across a cabin that went for three dollars. It was in the long, slender highway town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. [more inside]
A Father, a Dying Son, and the Quest to Make the Most Profound Videogame
A Father, a Dying Son, and the Quest to Make the Most Profound Videogame Ever: Wired interviews Ryan Green about That Dragon, Cancer, the upcoming game he created about his terminally ill son.
What Goes Through Your Mind: On Nice Parties and Casual Racism
"All these thoughts steamroll through my mind in the span of a few seconds, calculations firing while my cheeks burn and I stare at my plate. For the last time, I consider defending myself. Just giving voice to the confusion and anger and mortification I feel boiling in the pit of my stomach. But I know, in an instant that reminds me of countless others like it, that I’m not that person. The truth sinks in: I am the only one who can make sure that everybody keeps having a good time." Nicole Chung on what it's like when your holiday dinner is ruined by racism.
SHUT UP HOST!!!! SHUT UP!!!!!
4 MILLION HORSEPOWER OF MIMETIC POLYALLOY
There's an awful lot of fireworks in Peru
‘What are you looking for?’ It was always, ‘Arterial spray,’”
“If there was an unfortunate incident here [in the sake bar], and we were called upon to dismember a body into its constituent parts, I would probably be a good guy to have around,” quips Bourdain. “If inclined to help you out with this problem, I would certainly know what to do and pretty god damn quickly.”
Bryan Reesman reports on Anthony Bourdain's comic book, written with Joel Rose, for mentalfloss.
National Bird Day
Every January 5th, dozens of children in the United States wake up excited by the prospect of birdwatching. National Bird Day, now in its 14th year, is dedicated to the enjoying and preservation of our fine feathered friends. This year, organizers are encouraging people to take the “captive bird video pledge” and promise not to share videos of captive “pet” birds. Parents taking care of their babies
Treat YoSelf
On the sad seduction of “treating myself” during a crisis. My life became a blur of errands and chores and emotional breakdowns. As a woman nursing two men back to health, I felt stuffed into an archaic gender role for which I had little aptitude. It was getting to me.
And so I began to Treat Myself. Between retrieving my dad’s mail and my man’s pills, I ducked into swanky bars and flirtatiously asked the bartender about new cocktails. Barely able to squeeze in shower time, I instead dropped everything and went to Drybar, where for a precious 45 minutes, a stranger complimented my curls, caressed my head, enveloped me in the white noise of a blow dryer, and transformed my frizzy top knot into a fall of fragrant, golden silk. [more inside]
Mexican Mayor Killed After One Day in Office
Temixco is two hours' drive south of Mexico City, close to the resort town of Cuernavaca. The city of about 90,000 was catapulted into international headlines when its first female mayor was assassinated after less than 24 hours in office. [more inside]
Christmas Quackers
Ashley's Sack
“In Canada, complaining about the cold is a national pastime.”
Canada: A nation of winter wusses. by Aaron Hutchins [Maclean's Magazine] Canada used to pride itself on being the land of ice and snow. Now we avoid the outdoors—even when it’s not all that cold. [more inside]
M is for Marduk, that's good enough for me
Rules for Duels
The Code of Honor; or Rules for the Government of Principals and Seconds in Duelling by John Lyde Wilson 1858. (via Chief Justice John Roberts)
Southern Culture in the Threads
"For most of us, thread is something we think about only when it breaks — a lost shirt button, a ripped hem, a dangling end waiting to be trimmed. But for Natalie Chanin, thread is the tie that binds her to Southern textiles and to the relatives who worked at Florence’s Sweetwater Mill during the industry’s heyday." Kristi York Wooten writes about the history and resonances of Alabama Chanin, a "homegrown fashion line," for The Bitter Southerner.
How fortunate you’re not Professor de Breeze
Given that it's no longer widely taught in even the most prestigious high schools in the US and UK, and given the current economic climate, Why should Millennials Study the Classics?
The forgotten slaves of Tromelin Island
On July 31, 1760, L'Utile, a ship of the French East Indian Company loaded with an illegal cargo of about 160 Malagasy slaves, was shipwrecked on a barren, windswept islet now known as Tromelin Island, 500 km east of Madagascar. The French crew, with the help of the surviving Malagasy, built a makeshift boat and set sail for Madagascar two months later, leaving behind 60 Malagasy with three months’ provisions, a letter recognising their good conduct and the promise that someone would come back for them. Weeks passed, then months, then years. Since 2006, archeological teams have gone to Tromelin to examine the wreck site and learn about the lives of the marooned Malagasy: diary of the 2010 campaign. [more inside]
the art of eating as an omnivore
No diet, no detox: how to relearn the art of eating, by Bee Wilson, author of the weekly column, The Kitchen Thinker. "All the foods that you regularly eat are ones that you learned to eat. Everyone starts life drinking milk. After that, it’s all up for grabs. From our first year of life, human tastes are astonishingly diverse. But we haven’t paid anything like enough attention to another consequence of being omnivores, which is that eating is not something we are born instinctively knowing how to do. It is something we learn."
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